ICE ^ 




ITS WATERS, LAND 
AND LIFE 

BY JOHN [.BENNETT 



THE rffSfU-fiOll/A'S CO.. PUBUSM/^PS, S.F CAL. 



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Photo by Taber 



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San Francisco 



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RL-ASKA 



Its AaZt^ters, Ltxnd hnd Lir 



An Illustrated Lecture 



John E. Bennett 



1898. 



San Francisco 
THE MYSELL-ROLLINS COMPANY 



Copyrijihted by the Mysell-Rollins Co. 



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The Alexcindrian Archipelago 

.. AM) THE... 

Alaskan Peninsula. 




CANNOT remember the name of that special agent, who 
suggested to the Forty-first Congress that Alaska be 
abandoned by the United States upon the ground that it 
was an unprofitable investment, but whoever he was I will 
hazard the opinion that, at the time of writing his report, he 
had never made a tour through the " inner passage.'' That he 
had never steamed among the islands and canals vi'hich fringe 
the coast from Dixoa's Entrance, two hundred miles to the 
St. Elias Range, and thence with a stretch of sea and a 
northward curve on to Prince William Sound and the Kenai 
Peninsula. That he had never been thrilled by the experience of such a journey I will 
warrant, for if he had known such, it passes reason to imagine that he could ever have 
recommended our parting with what he could not but have recognized will, in time, 
become popularized as the grandest scenic region of the world. 

For as far as do the colors and fretwork of a California sunset lie beyond the powers 
of detailed reproduction by the artist, so do the scenic marvels of these isles and channels 
surpass the limit of descriptive narrative. From the time that you enter Clarence Strait 
until you move through Cross Sound again into the North Pacific, you are encompassed 
by a swiftly changing panorama of surprises. Your first sensations will be that you 
have strangely stepped off the ocean and are making a journey through inland waters 
that are not related to the sea. For the fresh scent in the cold, damp air is not the odor of 
brine, and this commingling with the agreeable exhalations of the forests which clothe 
the mountains upon your either hand, makes you feel that you are winding amongst a 
a mesh of rivers in some semi-frigid interior. 

As you move along the intricate ways, some of them scarcely two ships' length from 
bank to bank, you note that few of the islands have beaches, and that most of them rise 
abruptly out of the water and carry their dark green foliage boldly up to the line of 
snow. It is one hundred and fifty miles from the open sea to the farthest reach of tide 
water, but from many positions, as you pass along, you may have in plain sight the high, 
snow- whitened eminences of the Coast Range of mountains. Indeed, these gloomy 
verdured cones, standing here and there about you, environing you with their stalwart 
forms, seem but water-set foothills to those loftier, steeper, more broken elevations. Very 
often an overhanging fog obscures your vision to all but your close surroundings, and 
perhaps an almost ever present rain may fill the air. It may drizzle freely, or it may pour 
in such copious torrents as shall remind you of those old days of the ark, when the 
windows of heaven were opened ; but there will come days when the warm sunshine will 
bathe the scene with an effulgence of gold and silver, when the green of the forests will be 
livened with a lighter hue, when the cataracts plunging in broken lines of foam down the 



ALASKA, ITS WATERS, LAND, AND LIFE. 



sides of the island mountains shall mark the olive with a purer white, when the whole of 
nature shall seem to awaken with a calm spirit and reflect a smile that has been suppressed 
and concealed. 

It is pleasant at such a time to steam up the Gastineaux Channel and pause in front of 
the wharf at Juneau. This is a town of i)eaked and lumlier houses which spreads along the 

shore for a while, 
r — .- ~ ^ then mounts over 

■1 the back of a little 
rise and lies still 
at the foot of a 
threat green moun- 
tain which rears 
.i like a scowling 
I ' giant behind it. 

' It is a mining 
town, of about 
2500 souls, and 
bears the name of 
a French half- 
breed who in 1880 
was grub-staked 
at Sitka to come 
here and prospect 
for gold. He dis- 
covered a placer 
district close to 
the town-site and 
-'""'^''"' took from its ad- 

jacent veins 960 pounds of gold ore, worth $14,000. He found also the great mountain of 
gold quartz on Douglass Island, two and a half miles across the channel. This he sold to 
John Treadwell for $150. The operators of that mine now clear an annual dividend of over 
half a million dollars 

Jo.seph, I may remark, has no money now, and when I was last in Alaska he was 
preparing for a foray into the Yukon country, intent upon another test of that phenomenal 
luck which has so fav- 
ored him in the past. 

Leaving Juneau, we 
round Douglas Island 
and traversing the vari- 
ous channels get at last 
into Icy Strait. As we 
move thus we pass bays 
which bow their wide 
curves inland, and the 
sun shines within them 
white against their in- 
numerable floes of ice. 
And afar over to the yon 
side of such a bay we 

observe a line of pearly, Mountain Range of iron on Chilkal River. 







ya^ 





THE Ar.EXANDRIA.\' ARCHIPELAGO AND THE ALASKAN PENINSULA. 




glistening cliffs which rise two hundred feet from the water's edge; and if we near 
them we shall discover this high, broad face to be of ice, generally opaque, but sometimes 
of transparent, irridescent blue, scintillating with the sun, and fantastically carved, gouged 
into innumerable designs of protrusion and depression, many of great size, some highly 
architectural, ornate. These are the results of the meltings and uneven fractures of a 
glacier that is moving at a rate of sixty feet per day towards the sea; and as we pause we 
may hear the crash and thunderings, heavy, like some long drawn cannonade, of the ice 
boulders breaking away from the glacier and falling into the bay, there to float upon the 
surface and become bergs. 




Top of Muir Glacier. 



8 



ALASKA, ITS WATERS, I.ANU AND LIFE. 




Source of the 
Yahisee River. 



As we steam away the long reach of the 

glacier lying in its mountain ravine becomes 

apparent. Farther than the eye can reach, 

for twenty-five miles or more, it extends into 

the range, and from time to time in white and 

giant arms, it reaches up and takes the ice 

from connecting canyons. These transverse 

ice rivers are called Alpine glaciers, and the 

most perfect one is the Davidson Glacier, at 

the head of Chilkat Inlet, discovered by Prof 

George Davidson in 1868. The surface of all of 

these glaciers presents a strangely convoluted 

aspect, due to the 

uneven meltings 

of the ice, and 

many of them 

are crevassed 

with wide breaks 

hundreds of feet 

in depth. But the 

Alpine glaciers 

do not ahvaj's 

advance upon 

the sea. Often 

they merge into 

a great ice lake 

which forms at 

their foot and 

becomes another 

glacier called a 

Piedmont glacier. The largest of these latter is the Malaspina, fronting the ocean near the 

St. Elias range with a face of ice one hundred and fiftj' feet high and fifty miles in length. 

The Alpines making into it are radiant with rainbow hues and wonderful in their 

phenomenal colorings. One long ice mound will be 
pink, another purple, and a third a diamond blue. 
Every gulch in the range bears one, and in a reach of 
thirty miles of mountains, there are no less than 
sixty-one of these strange ice bodies. 

But the most remarkable of all the curious features 
in relation to this glacier, more remarkable it has seemed 
to me than that luxuriance of spikenards, shrubs 
and ferns which grows upon its surface, is that preat 
tunnel at the base of the glacier, out of which there 
rushes the Yahtsee River. It is the accumulated 
meltings and seepage of the vast ice field that finds its 
exit here, and it has borne with it millions of tons of 
detritus from the upper zone, which it has subsequently 
deposited and with it killed and nearly buried a great . 
forest of spruce which lay before it on its route to the 
A Jungle of Vegetation on the Top of the oceau. We Steam past Sitka, the seat of the government 

Malaspina Glacier. 



Spruce Forest Killed by the YahtS' 



ver en route to the Ocean. 




THE ALEXANDRIAN ARCHIPELAGO AND THE ALASKAN PENINSULA. 



/ 



•tt-cS': 






The Indian Section 
of Sitl<a. 



of Alaska under past and present regimes and 
observe it to be a pleasant town of about 1200, 
half of whom are natives. As we proceed 
northwester]}' along the line of the coast the 
grand and imposing form of Mount St. Elias 
looms in sight, its summit draped in fog, its 
shoulders epaulet ted with snow. It is 18,024 
feet high, next highest to Mount Logan, which 
stands behind it and which is the loftiest height 
of land in North America. 

Proceeding westerly we shall pass the very 
marshy delta of the Copper River, the mainland 
forested with spruce and overhung by sombre 

mountains, every rift in the ragged shore line being filled with shim;neri: g j^Iaciers. The 
Copper is a swift and tortuous stream, filled with rapids and wholly unnavigable. Copper 
deposits are abundant upon it, and gold is claimed to have been found upon several of 
its northern bends, though I have never .seen such. Many expeditions have been fitted 
out in San Francisco this year for gold prospecting on this river, and some hope to find 
their way through its Valdez Pass, over an alleged Indian trail, by what is asserted to be 
the shortest route to the Klondike country. 

The Kenai Peninsula is father west and were it not for twelve miles of a " dead " or 
motionless glacier, which connects it with the mainland, it would be an enormous island. 
A few streams make from its mountainous interior into the surrounding waters and along 
most of these prospectors have traversed and found gold. The streams however, afford the 
only pathways to the interior, and on the Kenai, as on the islands of the archipelago, the 
surface is not alone wooded with spruce trees from 70 to 80 feet high, with hemlock, red 
cedar, willow and birch, but there is an undergrowth of brush so dense as to be 
impenetrable. Besides this, there is a species of spiny cactus called "devil club," with 
fronds sometimes eight feet in length, which grows among the brush and gives briars to 
the tangle. The only trails through this confusion of vegetation are made by the brown 




The Village of Kadiak. 



ALASKA, ITS WATKKS, LAND AND I.Tl'E. 




ih.JHouse of Klu Klux, Chilkat Chiet, Win. tiur 
Selkirk in 1852. 



or black bears coming down to the 
water's edge to strike salmon out of the 
streams with their paws, for these bears 
live mostly upon fish. A region so 
beset with obstructions to progress and 
perils to life is not inviting to the 
prospector, which explains whj^ few of 
these areas have been explored. 

On the west, between the peninsula 
and the mainland, there is Cook Inlet, 
a great reach of the sea which extends 
way up to the glacier. My schooner 
I i\- on the muddy bottom in this inlet 
when the tide was out, but in a little 
while it came boiling in, running at 
a rate of nine or ten miles an hour, 



attaining at the flood a height of over 
thirty feet. 

As we move south out of Cook 
Inlet and along the shores of that singular 
trend of islands which under the name 
of the Alaskan Peninsula reaches eight 
hundred miles into the Pacific Ocean, we 
may look behind us and over the moraines 
and amidst the snow, catch a glimpse 
of the smoking craters of Iliamna and 
Redoubt, twin volcanoes, burning away 
on the mainland. 

We proceed, passing the group of 
Kadiak Islands, ten in all, with Kadiak 
and its five hundred whites and Creoles, 





Unga Harbor. 



A Mummy from Ka 



comprising its largest town. Nearly every family there has 
a garden, given to succulent vegetation, rare enough, 
indeed, in Ala.ska. There are Thlingit natives there, too, 
remarkable for their taste for designing upon wood ; their 
totem poles, carved trees, erected in front of their dwellings, 
being symbolic of their families in the tribe. 

On several of the Kadiaks there are ranches for the 
raising of fur foxes, silver, black, blue and red. But we 
are moving along the peninsula, and we pause among the 
brown and hilly Lslands of the Shumagins, entering Unga 
Harbor, which curves into a green hilly island of that 
name. It was famed in the old daj's for the sea otters 
which splashed in its caves, and it became a center for the 
sale of their pelts ; but the otters are gone now and in the 
vaults of the four mountains, Kagmil, and the rest, repose 
the dried carcasses of their Aleut despoilers, gone upon a 
long journey, whither the otter has disappeared. 




yHEN we reach Unalaska we leave behind us all that vast region of water and 
mountain islands comprised under the names of the Gulf of Alaska and the 
Alexandrian Archipalago. Only a cursory glance, under a full head or steam and 
at full speed, has herein been possible to us, yet it is in area and variety of life and climate 
nigh a world unto itself. No feature of it is more remarkable than the excessive precipitation 
which almost throughout the year visits this district. It lies upon the northern arm of 
the Kuro Sivva, the great Japanese warm current. Following its trend come the heavy- 
moisture-ladened clouds, low lagging close to the 
water's breast. They are forced upwards into cold 
heights by these towering mountains and there the 
vapors are condensed and rain pours down the slopes of 
the islands and the coast inclines of the mountains of 
the main land. These thickly grown forests and this 
rank vegetation is all a product of this rain. And yet 
the temperature is equitable. At Sitka the mean annual 
record of the thermometer is sixty-two degrees, about 
the same as at Washington City, yet the rain fall has 
been 103 inches in one year. Rain, fog, dark forests 
broken by contrasts of clear white glacier ice, high 
mountains, rugged and thrilling scenery, often agitated 
and made wild by the fury of some mighty storm, such 
features linger with us as a recollection while we move 
into Dutch Harbor, a part of the spacious bay which 
lies in the arms of Unalaska Island. An old volcano, 
called Mount Makushin, which occasionally indulges 
a smoke, rises about 6000 feet upon the northwestern 
interior of this island, and the other hills are steps to it, 
sometimes leaving a straggling, ragged piece of land in 
the sea, which forms the indentations for little bays. 
Farther east, on Unimak, lies Shishalden, puffing steam 
from its mouth 9000 feet in the sky ; and farther on 
rears, quiet Pavlof its crater stuffed with yellow sulphur. 
About two-thirds of the buildings in the town of 
Unalaska are owned by the Alaska Commercial snap Shot at Can 




ALASKA, ITS WATERS, LAND AND LIFfi. 




KlllinK Se 



St. George's Island. 



Company, which has, until the recent appear- 
ance of a competing concern, controlled 
nearly all the trade. It is a coaling station 
for vessels going into Bering Sea, and hun- 
dreds of craft stop there during the open 
season. The town contains only about 400 
persons, and of these many of the natives are 
absent much of the year engaged in hunt- 
ing otter. 

The salmon canning industry is chief among 
the enterprises which engage the people on 
the peninsula, as it is the important occupa- 
tion of the inhabitants of the entire of Southeastern Alaska. There are thirty-two 
canneries in all in Alaska, and their annual pack is about fifty million pounds. Alaska 
waters comprise, indeed, a vast lake of fish. It has twenty-six thousand miles of cod 
banks, greater and richer than those of Newfoundland, and existing through the same 
natural causes as do those of Newfoundland. For as they are upon the line where the 
warm waters of the Gulf Stream meet the cold ocean of the north, so are these upon the 
Arctic rim of the Kuro Siwa. Codtishing will be in time one of the greatest industries on 
the Northwest coast. The fish is precisely the same as that of the Atlantic, and the total 
catch in one j-ear has been as high as 1,274 tons, worth $24,500. 

The demand for, and great abundance of, salmon has turned the attention of the 
packers to this fish. During the running season all streams are alive with them and they 
may be scooped out with dip nets. I have, standing in the stream, caught them one in 
each hand by the tails and so lifted them wriggling out of the water. The largest, fattest 
salmon are those of the Yukon. There the)^ attain a weight of one-hundred and twenty 
pounds, and four of them will fill a barrel. 

Moving through Dutch Harbor we come into Bering Sea, which stretches north to 
where the head lands of Cape Prince of Wales pinch the waters against the coast of 
Siberia, form Bering Strait, and so define the southern limits of the Polar ocean. We shall 
sight the Pribilof or Seal Islands as we pass, the islands on which are the breeding 
rookeries and hauling grounds of the fur seals. The right to take seals is leased by the 
government to the North American Commercial Company and it may take 100,000 
per year. Only the young seals, or 
bachelors, are killed, and they are 
driven about ten miles inland, there dis- 
patched with clubs, the carcasses com- 
prising the chief subsistence of the 
alert natives of the islands. Indiscrim- 
inate pelagic sealing by foreign vessels 
shooting seal in the ocean while moving 

to and from their feeding grounds on ^^BLjf^^VIBUL J^^^H^ # c-.< t 

the edge of the warm current, has so ^^B^^l Jf V i M^^^^BHlCSKdilt'i 1^1 
greatly reduced the number of the 
animals that the attempt on part of the 
government to suppress these attacks 
upon seal life has long since become a 
diplomatic cjuestion. 

As we move eastward to the shore 

of the mainland in Bering Sea we begin KuskwoBmuits, N.ative Women, of the KuskoUwim River District. 




BERING SEA AND THE FROZEN OCEAN. 



13 





A Herd of Reindeer at Teller Station, Esk 

to accumulate evidences of the fact that we are drawing into Arctic 
Alaska. Occasional slabs of floating sheet ice, which have drifted down 
from the ocean suggest this, and when we reach the mouth of the 
Kuskokwim river and iind the natives living on the blubbers of the 
walrus and beluga whale, on salmon, black and blue berries soaked in 
seal oil and packed in bladders, on carrion salmon buried in the frozen 
ground, when we see such things the fact is further impressed upon u= 
The whalers, searching the seas for the baleen of the cetacean and 
for the ivory of the walrus, have well nigh ridded the northern 
waters of these species. And as the numbers of these have -^j 

been depleted the food supply of the natives has accordmgh 
decreased. Starvation has more than once visited 
the slothful, harmless Eskimo who inhabit the bleak 
slopes of the Bering Sea, and the total disappearance 
of the aboriginal Alaskan would necessarily follow 
the passing of the creatures 
of his subsistence. Ac- 
cordingly, the government 
has purchased from the 
Chuckchees, on the Siber- 
ian side, a number of 
domestic reindeer, with the 
view of making the Eski- 
mo, as are the Siberians, 
herders of this animal. 
Twelve hundred of them 
have been imported into 
Alaska, and have there 
been distributed to the 

various missions whose Taking Reindeer on Shipboard at Siberia 



14 



ALASKA, ITS WATERS, LAND AND LIFE. 




children are taught to attend them. The 
government, however, maintains the principal 
station in its own charge. The reindeer is 
peculiarly adapted to the climate of Alaska, 
in that it eats moss with which the whole of 
the interior region is covered ; cold and snow 
have no effect upon it, and its fur is the warm- 
est and most desirable of Arctic clothing. It 



:|t.^ v4*s5f* 



in the Arctic Ocean. 



is a fleet draught beast, but it cannot bear a pack except upon its shoulders. Its flesh is a 
delicacy, the milk is creamy and nutritious, but bitter and will not churn into butter. 

From Teller Reindeer Station at Port Clarence, to Point Barrow at land's end on the 
north, the coast is barren, desolate and wild. Nothing but whales are thtre in this 
polar ocean to attract vessels, but in pursuit of these, ships will penetrate the distance 
far into the latitudes of Herald Island. Whole fleets are sometimes caught in the 
ice there. The vessels sail into the sloughs formed by 
the gap between the shore ice and the sea ice. There comes 
a time in the fall when the sea pack starts to move down 
upon the ice along the shore and to close the gap. It is in 
these jaws that ships are seized, are crushed, masticated into 
splintery boluses and swallowed into the polar mr.w. At the 
time in which I write there is en route an expedition sent by 
the government to rescue a fleet of seven whalers cenunted 
yonder in the frozen sea. Very terrible affairs are these 
freezes, for rarely are the vessels saved, and too often the 
crews also perish. The miles of ice between them and the 
shore piled mountains high are almost impassable ; and the 
shore itself is desolate and comfortless. The whaler has the 
option of starving aboard or on land. When spring comes 
and the ice begins to move, the ships are carried far to the 
north and east, in direction of the pole, where they are 
ultimately crushed and destroyed. A number of vessels and 
men have been lost in this way, and it was with a hope of 
saving the lives at least that the government converted the cogmuiiik Esqurir 




BERING SRA AND THE FROZEN OCEAN. 



15 




Whaling Ve 



meteorological observatory at Point Barrow 
into a store house in which there is main- 
tained a year's provisions for at least four 
ships' crews. 

The vessels which I show in the 
picture, however, are not caught in the ice. 
They are at anchor in the harbor at Her- 
schel Island and will safely pass the winter. 
There is another harbor in this region, it 
is at the mouth of the Mackenzie river, 
the great Nile of the north. But other 
than in these havens there is small chance 
amidst the Arctic ice for a vessel once 
seized ever again to be released, and at 
all events it is best that ships should 
seek the south rather than attempt to pass the closed season in these latitudes. 

Though desolate indeed, yet this wild arctic Alaska is not without wonders and even 
charms. I know a vast area of plain within it, where the snow never lies ; it melts as fast 
as it falls, and the surface of the ground is warm. About eighty miles north from the 
northern coast and midway the territory there is a great lake of bitumen, very similar to 
that lake at Trinidad. South and east of this there is another singular lake, this latter of 
petroleum oil. It is ten miles long and seven miles wide, and the oil seeps into it from 
springs in the adjacent low hills. The depth has never been sounded, but tests of the 
fluid upon the surface show it to be a high grade petroleum ; and all around this lake for 
fifty miles there are vast deposits of coal. It is lignite, burns to a clean white ash, but it 
does not coke. 

Immense deposits of coal are aLso found at Cape Lisburne, about midway between the 
Bering Strait and Point Barrow, and it is in this district, growing out of the coal seams 
and upon the ice that, in the early spring before the ice cakes are melted, the most delicate 
flowers can in abundance be found. Saxifrage, dandelion, violets, grow amongst the vivid 
orange and reds of the lichens and the moss, while the white blossoms of the stunted 
willows are greedily devoured by the coveys of grouse which feed upon them. 

The flowers give a smiling contrast to the cheeiless face of that broad and boundless 

landscape, destitute of beauty save 
these tender touches of color. But 
different is it with the Arctic sea. 
In its cold immensity a pale glory 
diffuses the aspect. We see an 
infinite distance of snow^y surface, 
which you know to be ice, resting 
upon the water a score of feet thick ; 
an endless field of ice, solid as the 
floor of earth. And close beside j'ou 
there are ice eminences jagged into 
pointed peaks and sharp angles, as 
different from the glacier ice as 
though the materials were unlike. 
They stand there, these rigid things, 
product of some past years' jam, and 
off yonder upon the wide sheet there 




i6 



ALASKA, ITS WATERS, LAND AND LIFE. 




fif 



^:^t'^ 




Flowers Growing on the Ice at Cape Lisburiie. 



are more, and more bej'ond 
them, so that you might 
fancj'^ you were upon an 
enormous plain broken by 
craggy rocks. But, some- 
times even here there are 
hours of warmth and gen- 
iality. In those periods 
the blue ocean, floating its 
Victoria Regias of chalky 
ice, shall seem sensuous and .serene beneath the high warm sun, when even the broken 
barrier of the Siberian rock coast shall have a softened feeling in its undulating lines, and 
when palar nature is relaxed and mild. 

It is in this brief season, that not only the flowers blossom, as I have said, but edil)le 
vegetation may be cultivated. In a region where wild strawberries p.ave the earth with 
their succulent fruit, where the big salmon berry is so abundant that it is an important 
diet of bears, where you may walk through miles of large, luscious huckleberries, pendant 
from their stout, tough bushes, that such a country, yielding in abundance the spontaneous 
sweets of nature, should yet be incapable of responding to the toil of the agriculturist is not 
reasonable to suppose. Though above the Arctic circle the conditions are le.ss favorable than 
below it, yet, radishes and lettuce have been grown at Point Barrow and at Kozerevsky 
and Nulato, on the Yukon, the Catholic fathers have thriving gardens of potatoes, 
cabbages and turnips, while barley thrives in the fields and cows are successfully herded. 
But this season is short, and soon again snow covers the earth, and the long winter 
night once more enshrouds the country. Then when the sun has gone and the gloom is 
deep the heavens will be lit by a singular demonstration. Flickering light starts shooting 
in spaar points from behind a broad low bank of clouds which limn the horizon. It dances 
there a moment, serrated and restless, as though it were the effluence of a boilng sea 
beneath. Then suddenly it springs upward and darts toward the zenith in grand, in 
gorgeous bars of light. The low dark curtain has yielded its effulgence of glory and the 
heavens are ablaze with a marvelous illumination. For a moment it scintillates, beaming 
in its colors, violet and gold, green, purple and red, then the bars gather their ends in 
the highest heavens, draw into a corona above your head. As you gaze the lambent circle 
contracts into a radient nimbus. A silent explosion follows, and then the materials of the 
display, falling, disappear in a coruscating shower, which might seem to be a blessing of 
the Divine upon you, lone observer of this celestial spectacular. 




Summer Scene on the Coast of Siberia. 



The High Kotusks 

....AND THE ,,. 

Waters of the Lewis-Yukon. 




^^?HIS vast region of the far north has had always a kind 
V^^P of grim interest for me; that wide empire of moss- 
grown, undulating, tenantless plain, stretching away 
for thousands of square miles behind the bare cold coast 
which fronts the sea ; the great ocean of dark quiet water 
contrasting with the white splotches of floating ice, and 
beyond, the endless expanse of frozen sea, still and white, 
broken by bergs and cliffs, spreading away to the pole — these 
are memories ineradicable from the mind which has once 
beheld them. Our course now lies toward the interior of Alaska, however, and to reach this, 
the most traversable highway is the great Yukon, which, rising in the mountains 
guarding the southeast coast, makes a great curve, analogous to the shape of the shore, 
and, after flowing over 2,200 miles, joins the waters of the Bering Sea. 

The short rivers on the coast are mostly swift and unnavigable, but the Yukon can 
be followed in boats from the foot of the Kotusks to St. Michaels, and small steamers can 
ascend it for over 1,600 miles, as far as its only impediment to navigation, the White 
Horse Rapids. 

Passing Juneau, we enter the Lynn Canal, an arm of the sea nearly sixl)' miles wide, 
and steaming almost north, we leave the Chilkat on the left, and passing the peculiar 
peninsula and its straggling islands which separate the two tines of the fluid fork, we follow 
the Chilkoot Inlet to its source; and here at Dyea, upon a little flat at the foot of a big 
blufi" of a mountain we debouch. Skagway lies about six miles to the east and is a 
great cluster of tents pitched mostly in a swamp along the Skagway River at the mouth 
of White Pass. That pass is about 1000 feet lower than the Tyia (/. c, to pack) or 
Chilcoot Pass, and is altogether within the timber line. The road is on an easy incline 
and horses may readily travel over it. By reason, however, of the almost incessant rains, 
the way is muddy and slippery, and the short portion of the road which has been 
corduroj-ed ofiers slight facilities for travel. 

At Skagway and Dyea, all is tumult and confusion. Log and timber shacks, in 
which merchandising is conducted and saloons with gambling tables are kept, and tents 
galore with provisions stacked in canvas sacks, many of them standing out in the rain, an 
idle population in groups about the towns, waiting to perfect arrangements for starting 
over the passes, these are the scenes which crowd upon one making a casual survey of 
both places 

And all along the six miles up Dyea River men, and even women with little children, 
are pressing their way, the men towing boats loaded with provisions, the women trudging 
along dragging their babies by the hands. We enter the canyon where the trail becomes 
rough and starts to rise. From thence on it crosses streams or marshes, is strewn with 



i8 



ALASKA, ITS WATERS, LAND AND LIFE. 





Aion^ tlif Cour: 



bowlders and is at times broken and steep. 
Several little camps are upon the way-side. 
Sheep Camp, famed amongst the Chilkoots 
as the spot where man}' mountain sheep 
were killed, is 1,200 feet above tidewater 
and has several frame buildings where 
you may get a rough meal for a dollar 
and sleep under shelter for a dollar and a 
half Stone HouFe, at the end of the 
timber line, is 
two miles fur- 
ther on over a 
steep and muddy 
trail, and is the 
next camping 
place. It is a big 
jutting of rock 
on the mountain 
affording a sort 
of cove shelter 
from the strong 
sea winds which 
strike with their 
full force against 
tlie mountain's face. The trail is somewhat easier for the next two miles at tiie end of 
which the camping place called the Scales is reached ; here it was that the packers used 
to weigh their packs, which they carried over the pass for hire, charging ten cents per 
pound of burden. The rush of Klondikers has raised this price very much, and I have 
known as high as forty cents per pound to be charged. The packing has heretofore been 
done solely by the Chilkat and Chilkoot Indians and, until recently, these Indians ex- 
clusively have held the right to cross the passes ; the Chilkats so holding their pass at the 
head of the river of that name, and the Chilkoots likewise maintaining theirs. This was done 
because of a monopoly of trade claimed by these Indians with the interior natives between 
whom exchange of products of the sea for land furs was conducted during the spring and 
summer seasons. Lately, however, the Indians have found more profit in carrying the 
packs of whites going over the trails, than in trading with the interior Sticks, aii<l they 
have abandoned their heretofore self 
asserted and extensive privileges in 
tiie mercantile line. 

At the Scales, we are at the base 
of that obtuse angle formed by the ■^^■■fSiVli^Bl^^gKL 'ft:^^^)i 
precipitous rise of the final mile of 
the trail, before the summit is reached. 
We have been ascending along the 
bottom of a ravine with high hills 
on either hand ; now the way presents 
a bolder, broader aspect, and at times 
it is nearly perpendicular. Horses, 
however, have been gotten over this 

rise, bearing their burdens to its foot, 1.,^, ,,t me Even Trail Before Entering Dyea Cany 




THE HIGH KOTUSKS AND THE WATERS OF THE LEWIS YUKON. 



19 



then being unloaded and gotten over light, the packs carried up by men who put them on 
the horse at the summit, from whence there is an easy grade down to the chain of lakes. 
In the early eighties, when Schwatka made his famous trip over this pass and along 
the Lewis-Yukon, the "forcing of the mountains" was considered a remarkable feat. But 
really there is nothing extraordinary about it. I have travesed many routes and passes in 
the Sierra Nevadas and the Montana Rockies that were far more difficult than is any pass 
in the Kotusks. The only perilous feature about the latter occurs in the winter sea.son 
when the mountains are visited by frequent and terrible blizzards, in which one, if caught 
on or near the summit, may be frozen to death. But he is very foolish to suffer thus if he 
be so caught, for he may retreat, wherever he is, and camp. If he is on the inner side, a 






>"^*, 



short run back 

shelter, and if he 

roll down to the 

storm. It is 

the Dyea River 

from the summit 

side. Blue gla- 

side, and the 

along the slope 

first of these is 

before you reach 

mile or more in 

trail. When you 

Lake Lindeman 

through a vista 

tance you behold 

of blue crystal 

wooded shores 

mountains that 

hand. This lake 

long and per- 

It is calm in summer, though 

over it out of the passes. 

get a grip sufficiently .strong 

to ruffle them until the long 

Bennett is reached, when the 

strong that the surface is 

motion dangerous to boats. 

of slender spruce and pine 





will soon bring him to a place of 
is on the coast incline he can almost 
Scales, and find refuge from the 
about twelve miles from the head of 
to the summit and almost five miles 
to the mountaiirs feet on the land 
cier ice surrounds you on this inner 
.=eepage from them drains into pots 
which have formed lakes. The 
Crater Lake, and you pass another 
Lake Lindeman. These lakes are a 
length and are on the course of the 
reach tlie end of the last one, 
opens upon you 
and in the dis- 
an eleptical sheet 
with darkly 
lying Ij e t w e e n 
loom on either 
is about six miles 
haps a mile wide, 
the wind whistles 
Still these do not 
upon the waters 
sweep of Lake 
wind becomes so 
often lashed into 
A thick growth 
timber lines the 



banks of these lakes, but that from about Lake Lindeman is now very rapidly disappearing 
before the prospectors' ax. Boat building is the most needful industry hereabouts, and it 
consumes a week to whipsaw out timber to build a scow. This done, however, and the 
vessel constructed, the trip down to Dawson may be accomplished in about twelve days, 
making in all about fourteen or fifteen days of travel from the start at Dyea. 

This tedious business of boat building completed, we load the craft with our stores and 
proceed. The current runs about four miles an hour, the wind is with us, and a little 
paddling sends us pleasantly along. But for the prevalence of rain and fog, much lighter 
here than on the seaboard, however, the journey would be pleasant enough. Glacial ice is 
still in sight setting high on the caps of the mountains, and as we approach the narrow 



20 ALASKA, ITS WATERS, LAND AND LII-K. 

Stream which joins the Lindeman with Lake Bennett, there comes in sight upon our right, 
protruding througli the straggling pines upon the mountain tops, great masses of dull red 
rock which give a gloomy tone to the entire landscape. 

Lake Bennett is larger than Lindeman, being about twenty-eight miles long, but is 
upon the average very little wider. In fact, all these lakes are simply levels, where the 



Lewis has spread ; 

a few feet deep ; when 

again then the current 

stretches into a river, 

finds another level, 

and there is another 

have Tagish Lake 

then a six mile river 

a long stretch of river, 

which there is White 

these there is the last 

the system, Lebarge, 

long. While not at ^ai 

scenery along these 

same. The shelving banks rise 

pines, the mountains which flank 

snow. Along the shores of some 

Lake, great quantities of fluvial 

tributary streams, so that the 

is late spring and as we pass 
are blooming among the high 
banks. We keep well in the 
exhaled from the land, like an 
swarms of the most vicious mos- 
are not as bad as in some other 
Koskokwin which 
Sea, I have known 
vicious that the only 
tacks is by surround- 
smoking fires, and in 
have been detailed to 
throughout the night. 
Yukon is in the same 
not in such numbers 
there ; but this dis- 
their population and 
and at other places is 
by the presence of a 
of the most eff"ective 
introduced by nature 
humans. A green 





Porta j:e 
Between 




none of them are over 
the surface inclines 
increases and the lake 
and runs on until it 
where it again spreads 
lake. So it is that we 
after a two mile river, 
and Marsh Lake, then 
about midway of 
Horse Rapids, beyond 
and largest lake in 
about thirty-two miles 
Lindeman. aH mouotonous, the 

lakes is much the 
wooded with a small growth of 
them barren and seamed with 
of the lakes, especially Marsh 
mud have been brought down by 
shores are deep with muck. It 
along, wild violets and red roses 
grass and wild onions on the 
middle of the stream, for there is 
irritating consuming miasma, 
quitoes. Though bad here, they 
Alaska, and on the 
flows into the Bering 
them so numerous and 
escape from their at- 
ing the party with 
our camps there, men 
maintain these fires 
Though the lower 
locality, yet they are 
nor so blood-thirsty 
crepancy between 
voracity on the Yukon 
abundantly repaired 
small black gnat, one 
engines of torture ever 
to act against the 
sand fly is also a dis- 



tinguished pest on the Yukon flats and appears to annoy the Indians as greatly 
the whites. 

At White Horse Canyon the river increases its gait to ten miles an hour, plunges 
through narrow walls of black basalt and runs over sunken boulders in foaming rapids. 



The high koTusks and the waters of the lewis-vukon. 







Building Boats at Lake Bennett. 



So swift is the current at this place 

that the water washing the wall on 

the right, leaps up high against the 

rock and curls back and over with a 

foamy cap like a roller upon the ocean 

beach. It is dangerous to attempt to 

navigate these rapids, and foolhardy 

men who have done so have paid for 

their folly with their lives. There is 

a portage on the hill to the left and 

some one is constructing a cableway 

over this trail for the aid of travelers 

and for his own profit. When this is 

finished and when the hoist on the 

high lap of the Chilcoot Pass is 

working, when the ferry boats are 

plving the lakes on the mountain and the saw mill at Lake Bennett is buzzing out timber 

for boats, when all these facilities are in operation the trip from Dyea to Dawson will be 

plucked of some of its most exquisite terrors and most provoking obstacles. 

Rink Rapids with their black stack rocks in the water are easily run, and we approach 

Fort Selkirk on the left bank of the Yukon, across from the mouth of the Pelly River, 

which curves in from the south and east. All there is now left of this old station of the 

Hudson Bay Company are two or three sooty mud chimneys and some charred timbers. In 

1852, it was inhabited by eight men of the company, who with a party of Tagish Indians, 

left it for a day to pursue a hunt. During their absence the place was pounced upon by the 

Chilkat Klu Klux, at the head of a band of coast natives, who had sworn war against the 

the whites because they traded with the interior Indians and thereby turned them aside 

from traffic with the Chilkats. Klu Klux robbed the buildings, then burned them 

and returned 

"111 savage glory, home." 

It is not related that he or his tribe was ever punished for their outrage, and the 
expedition seemed to have resulted as he had hoped, for the place was abandoned and the 
company shortly after withdrew from the territory. 

Dark mountains crowd each other on either hand from Fort Selkirk on, and the river 
widens much since it has absorbed the Pelly. Sea gulls flit in white flocks and maintain a 
garrulous chattering among the rocks, while the trim martens fly about their cave nests, 

which they dig in the faces of the cliffs, 
and appear alarmed at our approach. 
At White River, a great stream making 
in from the west, the character of the 
Yukon changes. Heretofore, it has been 
a clear current, sometimes heightening 
its crystalline transparency with a tinge 
of blue. Now, however, on receiving 
the White, its waters turn muddy and 
ever after they continue thus. The 
White is well named ; it carries in 
solution a talc which renders it 
opaque. Henceforth the pretty graylings 
The Rink Rapids. which wc caught iu such abundance 




ALASKA, ITS WATERS, LAND AND I.IFK. 




The Portage aruund White Horse RapiJs. 

above, we can catch no more ; they must be taken with a net for they cannot see the hook. 
We shall pass the Upper Ramparts as we proceed and find them to be a high bluff on 
the left of the river, curiously eroded by the action of the weather into many turret-like 
points, a conspicuous configuration on the river's course. On our way we have observed 
numerous quartz croppings on the mountain slopes, and as quartz is vein silica, it may be 
mineralized oi not. Occasionally the wires of the telegraph from Vancouver or Seattle 
tremble with reports brought out by some returning Klondikers that the most sensational 
finds of gold veins have been made in the Dawson country, but I believe almost all these 
statements are efiects of the emotions. Quartz is abundant in the Klondike hills as it is 
everywhere throughout the gold scope of Alaska, but up until Christmas, 1897, such assays 
as had been made of specimens taken from the locality, had proved barren. Taber, the 
San Francisco photographer, who has photographed extensively over some parts of Alaska, 
and a few of whose views I print herein, tells however, of a strike recently made on the 
Lewis, near the Big Salmon River, the a.ssays of which showed seventy-one ounces of 
silver and two ounces of gold. There will unquestionably be rich and extensive quartz 
finds made in the Yukon district, but such will not occur until the attention of miners have 
been largely drawn from placer mining or the present population of the country, which 
outside of Dawson, is about 3000, receives such accretions that the readily located placer 

ground becomes taken, and hunting for quartz will 
be as easy as seeking new placers. As it is the 
conditions are much against prospecting for veins. 
The hills are covered with moss to a depth of 
three feet, which obscures the ledges, makes 
walking exceedingly difficult and most of the year 
this moss is solidified by a concrete of ice. 
But we are at Dawson and there arrives with us 
a great concourse of people, in uncouth boats with 
smoking stoves, boats wherein they have been 
confined for the fortnight past. They have floated 
with us from Lake Lindeman down and now have, 
Winter Quarters at the Mouth of the Peiiy. for better or worse, reached their destination. 






^^*HERE has been some little prospecting done about 
v(^P Hootalinqua and Pelly Rivers, but only colors 
have been found, and bed rock could not be reached 
because shafts were sunk in the warm season, and the 
water coming in at the bottom drove the workers out. On 
the Stewart a shaft was put down to bed rock, but few 
traces have rewarded the enterprise. These cursory 
examinations are by no means convincing that there is not 
gold in paying quantities yet to be found in the districts 
thus prospected. Indeed, the prospecting which has been 
done in the auriferous districts of Alaska is so slight as compared with the area that no 
opinion upon the gold-bearing possibilities of localities outside of those upon which 
development has actually taken place are worth the printing. Nor can it be said that there 
is any such thing as a gold belt or mother lode in Alaska. This is the opinion of Charles 
G. Yale, one of the leading mining and mineralogical experts of San Francesco, who has 
looked the ground carefully over, and nothing that I have seen or heard has changed this 
idea in my mind. Prior to the discoveries in the Klondike, all the raining had been done 
on the south side of the Yukon, along the many brooks which flow north and join 
that stream ; along Sixty Mile Creek, Forty Mile Creek, American Creek, on tributaries of 
Hirch Creek, that small river which meets the Yukon upon its westward bend. This is 
the region in which the mining had been conducted, and on some, particularly on the 
streams of Birch Creek, excellent results had been obtained. They had built up the 
adjacent town of Circle City, and in four months of last year the Birch Creek output was 
about $300,000. These gold diggings of Alaska have for the past ten years been a safe 
place for a laborer to go. Working upon his own claim he could always make wages, 
which are there rated at ten dollars per day, and he could feel that he had constantly a 
chance of striking some rich deposit, or at least he would be in the district if it should 
occur that rich strikes were made elsewhere, and he could accordingly be first among the 
rush to such a place. 

If you will refer to the map of Alaska you will observe that the territory of which I 



24 



ALASKA, ITS WATERS, I.ANll AND I.II-E. 




speak, while it lies south of the Yukon, atid 
is concave in shape to meet the great bend 
which the river makes, yet it is a vast stretch 
of country. In topography it is broken by 
sporadic mountains, in which the streams 
head, and interspersed by high plateaus. 
Nothing like consecutive trend or range can 
be made of these elevations, and the same 
remark is applicable to the deposits of gold. 
We know gold is found in paying quantities on 
Sixty Mile, and it is found in like abundance 
at Minook^ over two hundred miles below the 
Porcupine ; and farther down the Yukon 

Si\l\ .Wile Pcisi 

where the great Tanana makes in, ptomising 
colors have been found. Further down still and on the opposite side, on the Koyukuk, 
other good prospacts have been discovered and some little gold has been taken out. But 
neither of these streams has even been explored, so that nothing is more clear than that 
gold is .scattered, here and there, all over the interior of Alaska, and that, so far as our 
knowledge now exists, any talk of a definite gold belt is an absurdity. In fact, I have 
never heard of but one river in Alaska upon which all i|ualified to speak, seem to agree 
that there is no gold, and that is the White. 

But even in the most mined part of interior Alaska, that south of the Yukon, few of 
the streams have been investigated or even explored, and a vast unpenetrated domain is 
there, awaiting prospectors. Upon the north side a very much less area is known. An 
idea of the Klondike district may be gotten from the following facts : — 

The Yukon River, a narrow muddy stream, flows at the foot of a low range of mess 
covered hills, which rise upon the north. The country of these hills is exceedingly rugged 
and wild, the creeks which cut them being deep and narrow. There flow into it out of 
these hills, and at right angles with the river, the following streams, they being from 




First Steamboat Reaching the Site of Dawson After the Klondike Discoveries. 



THK GOLD I'l.ACERS OF THE KLONDIKE CREEKS. 



25 



twelve to fifteen miles apart : The Klondike, a blue, shallow and rapid river, then next 
east Dion Creek, then further east Bryant Creek, then Montana Creek, then Indian River, 
smaller than the Klondike, then Henderson Creek, and finally and further east, Stewart 
River, about the size of the Klondike. Such are the streams emptying into the Yukon. 

On the Klondike the streams which bear the gold run from the hills upon the east of 
the river. The first creek is Bonanza, the next Bear, the third Hunker, the fourth Too- 
Much-Gold, and the fifth All-Gold. These creeks are from twelve to fifteen miles apart, 
and each empties into the Klondike. 

Bonanza also has tributaries. Those which have been prospected and have received 
names run into it from the south. These are Boulder, Adams, Skookum and Eldorado. 
Upon Hunker Creek the tributaries, also from the south, are Last Chance and Gold Bottom. 

The gold bearing tributaries of Indian River flow out of the same hills that the 




Dawson, from Across the Yukon. The Klondike Hills . 



the Right of the Picture. 



Klondike creeks drain, though upon the opposite or eastern slope. The Klondike creeks 
flow from the east, the Indian River creeks flow from the west. They are Ophir, Quartz, 
Sulphur and Dominion, which latter two join as forks and meet the Indian as one creek. 

Some prospecting has been done on all the creeks named on Indian River, but it is 
only in its tentative stages. Thus far the indications are excellent for large deposits. On 
the Klondike no probing has been done above Hunker Creek ; most of the streams are yet 
to be named ; even the length of the Klondike River is not yet known ; from the size of 
the stream at its mouth, however, it is though to be about 250 miles long, and of this 
length not over 12 miles have been prospected. In the network of creeks I have named 
there are about 350 linear miles, all of which have been taken up in claims. There is no 
room for doubt that the gold in the creeks has come out of the adjacent hills, that it has 
been eroded from veins there by weathering and transported by the vehicle of water into 
the creek bottoms by whose rock riffles it was caught and held. The glacial theory, that 
the gold has been conveyed from long and unknown distances by the movement of 



26 



ALASKA, ITS WATKKS, LAND AND LIFR. 




Sko'tkiini (iuUh - $250 ooo was paid for two claims on this Gulch from which $30,000 was taken in six weeks. 




Eldorado Creek.— Mining; by shafts 
into a sluice box. Over $2o.ot 



link to bed rock, the dirt raised in buckets by windlasses, is dumped 
> was taken from one of these 12x16 feet boxes. 



THK GOLD PLACERS OF THE KLONDIKE CREEKS. 



27 





Forty Mile 



Upon this theory Ophir and Quartz 



ice, is, to ray mind, untenable. 
The country is lacking in glacial 
evidences, and it is questionable 
whether the}' have ever existed 
here. 

El Dorado, which is really 
an extention of Bonanza Creek, V 
and properly is Bonanza Creek, 
is the richest of the placers, and 
this would mean that the veins 
which have furnished all the 
the gold were cut by the head- 
waters of this creek ; accordingly, 
I have thought, that the creeks 
upon the other side of the divide, 
which head about where the El 
Dorado heads, will contain great quantities of gold. 
Creeks ought to develope well in the metal. 

Bonanza Creek is about twenty-three miles long and has claims upon every five hundred 
feet of its length, containing in all about two hundred and fifty claims. El Dorado is eight 
miles long and has sixty-four claims. The gold in each lies at from eighteen to twenty-two 
feet below the surface, mostly upon a bed rock of shale, the upper measure of which has 
been split by freezing, and the gold, enveloped in a clay cement, has found its way into the 
crevices of this rock. It is sprinkled too, quite liberally, through the lower gravels of the 
deposits, but the upper zones of it do not contain over fifty cents to the panful of dirt. 
Five or six feet of the surface material is a deposit of vegetable mold, rendering the 
ravines exceedingly unsuggestive to the miner of their auriferous contents. The entire of 
this ground is frozen throughout the year, except about three months of summer, when the 
two feet of surface muck is thawed. This frozen state is favorable for drift mining, for 
the ground in the shafts and tunnels sustains itself and does not have to be supported by 
timbering. The material is taken out during the winter season by thawing with fires 
which are started at night in the workings. When lifted to the surface it is piled up and 
on the opening of spring, when the water begins to run in the creeks, it is sluiced in boxes 

in the ordinarj' way. 

The gold in these creeks does 
1^^^^^ not lie uniformly across the bot- 

toms, but is in streaks and spots, 
l^m^ and .some claims, even on El 

Dorado Creek, are almost barren. 
But the pay spots are so rich that 
there can be small doubt that 
El Dorado will average a yield of 
$T,ooo per running foot over the 
whole length of the creek, and that 
the entire creek will turn out about 
$40,000,000. Bonanza Creek will 
yield at a less rate, and the other 
creeks, so far as is known, will 
grade down still smaller. I estimate 
that the output for the summer of 




28 



ALASKA, ITS WATERS, LAND AND LIFE. 



1898 from the whole district will be about $12,000,000, and that next year it will be two 
or three times that quantity. 

Pans of dirt which wash out $800 do not prove the richness of a district, any more 
than those pans which reveal merely colors ; but, upon the whole, there is no doubt that 
the Klondike Creeks are enormously rich. Of late it has become common to talk down 
the locality and we hear statements that it does not amount to very much after all. But 
these derogations arise from a movement among the big claim owners to have the Canadian 
government repeal the ten per cent royalty act, upon the ground that the claims cannot 
afford to pay it. It has seemed to me that the act was just, for surely the land belonging 
to the government, it is entitled to some revenue from it, and when it is to be considered 
that this will be spent in affording public facilities to the people there it might be cheer- 
fully yielded. 

The Canadian mining laws are made for the people, those of the United States promote 
monopoly. On Canadian ground one man may take up only 200 feet of a creek bed, he 
can locate but one claim in a district, and if he leaves the claim for seventy-two hours he 
forfeits his rights to it. On the American side he may stake off [500 feet claims, and he 
may have as many of them as he pleases. It costs him nothing to hold them for an entire 
year, and his title is renewed if he has exerted $100 of labor upon each of them. He may, 
therefore, seize a whole creek and all its branches. Under this arrangement a few men 
would have owned all the Klondike placers, and the balance of the 3000 who are now 
working in them would be simply laborers, and wages would not be $1.50 an hour 
either. Two hundred feet of ground of average richness will afford an}' man a moderate 
fortune, and the limited gold lands may be shared bj- thousands, instead of by hundreds. 

On the left bank of the Klondike, at the confluence of the Yukon, is the town of 
Klondike, and on the right bank is Dawson. It is an unlovely spot, built on a muck 
marsh, its establishments chiefly comprising saloons. Its structures are tents or miserable 
log shacks, the largest building in the town being a dance hall. Gold is abundant about 
town, all in dust and nugget form, but food is correspondingly high A cup of coffee costs 
fifty cents and a poor meal, $2.50. Some were pinched by hunger during the past 
winter, but, like the gold in the creeks, some had abundance and to spare, while others 
were nearly without. Equally divided there would have been plenty for all. We shall not 
tarry here, it is an unpleasant place, so again on the tawny water, we are en route. 





In Comfortable Winter Quarie 



t«M r.^i.r. I'. 



The Great Yukon 

FROM THE ... 

Porcupine to the Delta. 




Grubstack at Rampart City. 



^jf^ERHAPS an oomeak, one of those long boats built 

b}' the Yukon Indians, covered with walrus hide 

two inches thick, and capable of carrying twelve 

persons, would be as comfortable a vessel in which 

to navigate the great Yukon as any. For from Dawson 

some hundreds of miles below, the river is very shallow, 

and last winter some of the lightest draft steamers, drawing 

but three feet of water, were unable to ascend higher than 

Circle City. The river, encrusted with ice during eight 

mouths of the year, opens in June, first breaking at its headwaters, where the streams 

between the lakes rarely freeze. A month later the lower Yukon melts and though the 

ice blocks jam and pile here for a while, tearing down islands and building others, yet they 

finally succumb to the increasing heat of the recurring days, and presently the great 

sluggish, muddy stream is again serene and fluid and it spreads over broad lengths in its 

lazy way, so that at parts you may not see its farthest shore. 

The people of the old Hudson Bay Company thought the Yukon continued north and 

emptied into the Arctic Ocean ; and the earliest maps mark the river so trending. The 

company's men accordingly, carried their goods overland from the Mackenzie River to 

Vancouver, and it required seven years to accomplish the trip. They did not know of 

that remarkable turn which the Yukon makes at its confluence with the Porcupine. 

Above and below this junction the river is full of small islands, manj'of them mere deposits 

of alluvium accumulated where driftwood has caught in the water, and along the river 

banks we may see trees lying over, their tops in the water yet their roots still in the soil. 

The current cuts beneath them and 

presently they are separated from the 

bank and carried down the stream 

to furnish firewood, perhaps, to the 

inhabitants of St. Michael's Island, 

over a thousand miles below. We 

shall pass numerous Indian villages 

as we proceed, and we shall discover 

that the natives of the Yukon district 

are the lowest in their scale of living 

of all the Eskimos. If we go ashore, 

we may stumble into some pit three 

or four feet deep, in which there is a 

revolting mess of carrion blubber, 

covered with a scum of green slime. Lake m Petr. 




30 



ALASKA, ITS WATERS, LAND AND LIKE. 




and this is a food cache of a denizen. 
As we near the mouth of the river, we 
come upon the strangest of all the strange 
wonders of Alaska — the Yukon Delta. 
It is a vast ino.ss marsh extending two 
luiiidred miles up the river and fronting 
the Bering Sea with a face three hundred 
miles in width. Its surface is covered 
with green or gray moss which grows 
upon a pavement of ice a few feet beneath 
the surface. This ice concrete stretches 
^orcupme. ^^^^^ ^ large district of the Yukon and 

adjacent rivers. At some places the cross streams which cut it show it to be a hundred 

feet thick and their waters are a black ooze drained from the decaj-ing roots of the moss. 

On the Koovvak, which empties into Kotzebue Sound — above that strange head of land on 

the end of which is Cape Prince of Wales — on that stream the ice cliffs are one hundred and 

fifty feet high, and in many places they are filled with the tusks and bones of the extinct 

mammoth. Gold in considerable quantities has been found on the streams of this river 

and several parties are, as I write, fitting out in San Francisco to prospect them in spring. 

This vast deltoid plain, cut by the 

m.my shallow stringers of the river's 

mouth, is in the hot summer when 

the thermometer is a hundred degrees, 

a wide field of color. Innumerable 

yellow and purple flowers clothe it 

and above them waft the gaudily 

colored wings of the butterflies. And 

cfi" to the north, bending on to the 

Bering Sea, runs the only navigable 

channel of the Yukon. It carries four 

feet and a half of water at best, and 

vessels exceeding that draft cannot 

enter it. It moves with its deltoid 

detritus on to sea, with whose waters it mingles its mud. It has marvelously shoaled this 

sea so that vessels cannot approach the flat, and when you are opposite this place, yet out of 

sight of land, you may still have three fathoms of water. 

And now we are at St. Michaels' Island on which is the town where the Yukon 

steamers stop and vessels find a harbor. It is an ancient Russian kakat with a Greek 

Church and United States government buildings, a customs' officer, and a few soldiers. 

It is a busy place in summer, though, during that brief period when the Yukon 

is open to traffic and the whalers are coming down out of the northern ocean. 




Breaking Up of ihe Ice on the Pi 



? near its Conllu 




BiiilJinu ail Oomeak. 



THE GREAT YUKON, FROM THE PORCUPINE TO THE DELTA. 

As we floated down the Yukon we 
passed numerous villages whose names 
appear upon the maps in formidable length 
and intricacy. When we neared them, 
iiowever,we found them to be far inferior in 
character to what the names might, to the 
unknowing, have suggested. We, who 
were struck with the Muscovite guttural 
of ''Andreafsky," "Nowikakat," ''Razboin- 
itskaya" or " Kinegnagmiut," and who 
had our fancies turned to behold spires 
and burnished domes like we had seen at 
Moscow, felt a sense akin to shock when 

there hove in sight upon the river's bank a settlement to which such a name belonged. 
It was Nowikakat. No habitation could be more primitive than this we here beheld. 
A mere collection of sticks taken from the river's driftwood, were piled together to serve 
some rude form of shelter. Such houses are, however, the abodes of summer. In winter 




Nuwikak.U -An tskii 




On the Lower Yukon near the Sea. 

the chinks are stuffed with moss, and if the ground is solid a burrow is made beneath the 
surface. Into this all crawl ; the heat of the bodies of the occupants and the numerous 
tapers burning oil raise the temperature to an agreeable degree, and when bed time comes 
the entire family divests all clothing and retires together betv\'een skins, the apparel of each 

member being used for the owner's pillow. 
In this manner, though the cold without may 
be fathoms below zero, yet the sleepers 
repose comfortably, for each contributes 
warmth to the other. 

Transportation by land throughout this 
country is at present done by dogs. They 
are even used by potato growers near the 
Klondike to drag the plow ; but I opine the 
lime is not long when their use will be 
displaced by that of the reindeer. The best 
Driftwood on the Banks of the Lower Yukon. sled dogs are the St. Bernards, but even 



Ik 




32 



ALASKA, ITS WATERS, LAND, AND LIFE. 




of these it requires five to haul a 
sled containing seven hundred and 
fifty pounds and though they are 
fed but once a day, at evening, yet 
the}' consume each three pounds 
dry weight of rice and bacon and 
this is expensive, and must be 
carried on the pack. The rein- 
deer draws more, drags faster and 
will paw through the snow for its 
food, which even if such is carried, 
is merelj' moss and inexpensive. 



And now my reader, such is our journey over this mighty and marvelous region, and we 
have come to part. This land which we call Alaska, is with its islands, upwards of five 
hundred and eighty thousand square miles in area, or as large as all that part of the United 
States lying east of the Mississippi. We have traversed much of it on our cursory trip, 
but much remains unseen. We could have entered the interior by other routes than that 
selected ; by the Stickeen River from Fort Wrangell, one hundred and fifty miles to 
Telegraph Creek, over one hundred and fifty miles of portage where a railroad is now 
building, and over Teslintoo Lake into the Hootalin([ua, thence into the Lewis below White 
Horse Rapids; or we could have come over the Dalton trail, across the pass of the Chilkats 
arising from the village of Klukwan, or we could have followed the Taku River from its 
outlet, then a trail of forty miles to the Tesleeti Like and so into the Lewis ; but I have 
chosen to take j^ou by the route most traversed, over the Chilcoot Pa.ss where even now so 
many persons are struggling beneath their packs hopefully toward the land of gold. 

And now as the sun is sinking, let us look again upon that supreme of wonders of the 
north. In winter only his glare is daily for a few hours seen upon the horizon, and when 
he rehurns in springtime his keen reflection upon the snow drives even the natives to 
protfe'ct their eyes with tiny punctured goggles of wood ; and here in the sttmmer his limb 
but touches the horizon and he ascends. It is midnight and he hangs there a great 
bloody ball, like a frightfully congested moon, as though his white orb were being cooled 
in the polar ocean. We look upon him for the last time for the door of our stateroom 
closes and the engine bell jingles away for San Francisco. 




The Sun .11 MiJninlit off Point Barrcw. June 



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